


The Crumbling Id

by The_Exile



Category: Nier Gestalt | Nier, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Community: 40fandoms, Gen, Post-Game(s), Post-Undertale Genocide Route, Spoilers, post-Nier D Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 17:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10470324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Sans doesn't like it when unpleasant people have access to technology (or magic, same difference) that can erase the memory of one's very existence from the Universe.





	

Sans watched as he chose his new name.

The man who had been known as 'Nier' five seconds ago had not only lost his name, but also the ability to ever pick it up again. Sans was a special case, but the skeleton wasn't sure if anyone else in the Universe would ever remember that there had been a Nier, that any of the events in his life had ever happened. That entire period of time may even have disappeared entirely from everyone's memory, along with the knowledge of the very existence of the name 'Nier'. That was the sort of power behind the magic - or it might have been science, Sans found that there was little difference at this level - that had been used on Nier. No, that he had used on himself. Under any other circumstances, Sans would have called him the biggest madman and fool in the Universe, but he knew that it had been done in the name of love. Love, not LOVE - the man known as Nier had just sacrificed his very soul, his core existence, so that another person who he cared about more than anything else in the Universe could carry on existing. It would have brought a warm glow to Sans' heart if the skeleton had internal organs. 

He was still concerned that the people of this world had that sort of technology, though.

When he said 'people of this world', Sans was fairly sure there were, like, three or four beings who even knew such power existed. One of them was about to be removed from the collective memory of the Universe like someone who had pissed off the wrong Egyptian deity. No doubt he would forget he had the power in the process, then any of the others who only knew about the power because he had it would also forget about it. Sans was fairly sure the entity known as Tyrann knew all about it anyway. This was hardly reassuring. Tyrann was such a nasty piece of work, Sans was beginning to miss the days when he only had to deal with Flowey. Of all the entities in the Universe who could possess the secret knowledge to permanently erase someone's soul, Tyrann was on his top ten least favourites. 

That said, Tyrann had told Nier that he had the power, even though the man was going to use it against him, to unleash the power he needed to free Kainé, Tyrann's host, from the parasitic relationship and stop Kainé from dying under its strain. A parasite couldn't survive without its host, or at least without the ability to jump to a new host, and Tyrann had nowhere to go. He must have known he wouldn't survive that. Why would someone responsible for so much suffering, responsible for the whole mess in the first place, commit such an act of self-sacrifice? Was it an apology for being unable to go against his own essential nature, that of an unusually destructive parasite?

Or was it also love?

It didn't matter, Sans told himself sternly. Anyone - well, almost anyone, he corrected, shuddering at the memory of the knife flashing towards him and the fevered grin on the child's face - could have a redeeming moment, a single mote of light in the darkness of their soul. Heck, even Flowey could give out vital advice when he actually had the confidence to think it might make a difference. It didn't change the fact that a very dangerous power was just sitting there waiting to end up in the hands of any psychopath who wandered past, and there were some very messed-up people in that particular world. There had been a tragic accident with a very similar type of magic, one that was supposed to separate everyone's psyche from their physical shells to stop them dying of a plague, except that their psyches had malfunctioned in some way, rejected their forms when they tried to to go back in, then gone crazy and started attacking the shells on sight. This was exactly the reason why people shouldn't just be allowed to obtain this kind of magic without any supervision, Sans thought to himself.

It was probably too late to save the original personalities, the 'shades' as they were called, for the simple reason that the shells, who believed themselves to be the 'real people', had already murdered most of the shades. To be fair, they had no idea about their true nature and almost all the shades attacked them on sight, but, as usual, the humans had taken it too far, begun to actively hunt down the shades and destroy their means of reproduction in an attempt to wipe out their entire race. 

Sans ran into the same scenarios wherever he went.

At least now the whole disaster with the shades was beginning to resolve itself, if to no-one's satisfaction, and Sans would be less likely to get attacked by both sides when he went to investigate the forbidden technology.

If he did end up confiscating it, he wondered, would he playing God? Was this the natural flow of scientific progress, to always end this way? Did he truly have the right to say which worlds were and were not ready to access certain technology and magic, that some worlds were faulty and some worlds were working? He wished Gaster were still here, so that he could spend hours bitterly arguing the point with his mentor without ever coming close to reaching a conclusion. Those had been good days, when it seemed like his own world was actually getting somewhere. He wondered if there had been scientists sitting around a table in some institute in this world, too, praising each other over their latest accomplishments until they realised what they had just done and their looks turned into frozen masks of horror.

Sans also wondered what the man formerly known as Nier would end up naming himself. He was sure taking his time over it.


End file.
